On Monday November 8th 2021, the trial of the Lebanese priest Mansour Labaki was held in the French charged him of rape and the sexual abuse of orphaned children.
The trial charged the Maronite priest, who is 81 years old, after two hours of Deliberations. According to his charges, his name will be listed in the perpetrators of sexual crimes, according to the Agence France-Presse.
Labaki still lives in Lebanon, he didn’t attend the trial, and the Lebanese state refused to extradite him despite an international arrest warrant that was issued in 2016.
The Priest’s Pressure Against Victims
The Prosecutor Pascal Shaw who condemned Labaki to 15 years of criminal reclusion said in his pleading that Labaki didn’t stop defaming the plaintiffs, and he even accused one of them of madness.
He added “the Priest pressured directly and indirectly against the victims and their families”, clarifying the penalty requested is due to the dangerous crimes the criminal did.
At the beginning of the trial, the Prosecutor in France said “The investigation was long, very long. Mr. Labaki did not respond at all to the investigating judge’s requests, claiming that he had health problems that we could not verify.”
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
Labaki founded and ran a center between 1991 and 1998 to host Lebanese children orphaned due to the Lebanon war in Dover-la-Delivrand (Calvados) near Caen in western France. He is accused of taking advantage of a number of girls in the center and assaulting them during that period.
He is being pursued in a case of rape and assault on three girls, but only one of them filed a complaint. “The other two girls are sisters, and they received several threats in Lebanon,” said public defender Solange Domic.
